Susan Pharr

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Susan Pharr has been a visiting scholar or fellow at the University of Tokyo, Keio University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars, and the Brookings Institution. She has served as senior social scientist with the Agency for International Development.

At Harvard, Pharr serves on the steering committee of Harvard's Asia Center and the Executive Committees of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies.

Pharr's works include Political Women in Japan (1981), Losing Face: Status Politics in Japan (1990), (with Ellis S. Krauss) Media and Politics in Japan(1996), and (with Robert D. Putnam) What's Troubling Democracies? (spring 2000) as well as numerous articles. From 1985 to 1987, she held the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Among her many research interests are Japanese domestic politics, international political economy of development, and international relations of Asia. She is currently writing a book on political ethics and public trust in advanced industrial democracies, focusing on Japan with comparisons to Italy and the United States